PSN's Instant Game Collection - i.e. games free for PlayStation Plus subscribers - has been announced for the month of April.

Starting on 8th April, PS Plus members will be able to snag Dishonored (PS3), Alaskan native adventure Never Alone (PS4), the FPS/roguelike Tower of Guns (PS4/PS3), and the stylish platforming adventure Aaru's Awakening (PS4/PS3).

On Vita, subscribers will receive Killzone Mercenary and the upcoming Chilean stealthy puzzler MonsterBag, which put you in the role of a cute blue creature tasked with scaring folks using telekinetic powers.

Critically acclaimed baseball game, Super Mega Baseball, will make its European debut on PS4 and PS3 this Wednesday.

The debut effort of Canadian developer Metalhead Software, Super Mega Baseball was very well received upon its North American debut last December.

"We were blown away by the great response, including some wicked reviews and a Sports GOTY nod from Polygon," said Metalhead co-founder Scott Drader on the European PlayStation Blog. "What we were not ready for however (although were pleasantly surprised by!) was the number of requests along the lines of 'I'm in Europe, I love baseball, and I want your freakin' game.'"

Star Wars Pinball developer Zen Studios has revealed its next table based on Star Wars Rebels.

Due on the week of 27th April for Zen's stable of pinball series - including Pinball FX2, Zen Pinball 2, and Star Wars Pinball - this upcoming table will be based on Disney XD's animated TV series. As such, it will encompass seven missions that include the show's roster of characters and vehicles with fully-animated TIE fighters and the starship Ghost.

Back in 2013 Zen Studios wowed Eurogamer contributor Rich Stanton with its Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back table. "It seems ludicrous to say it about a pinball table, but this feels inextricable from the universe, its elements combining into something truly evocative," he wrote in his glowing Star Wars Pinball: The Empire Strikes Back review.

Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin has been priced on PC, both as a standalone package and as an upgrade for existing players.

So here's how it shakes down: There are two versions of Scholar of the First Sin on PC; one on DirectX9 and the other on DirectX11. The former is the existing version of the game with all its DLC, while the latter is basically the equivalent of the PS4 and Xbox One versions with all the new graphical updates and content that entails.

This means the DirectX11 version adds new enemy placements, fiercer foe AI, six-player multiplayer (upped from four), new weapons and armour, and the whole thing will just look nicer.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1744559Mon, 30 Mar 2015 17:09:00 +0100Headteachers threaten to report parents who let their children play 18-rated games

A headteachers group has threatened to report parents who let their children play 18-rated games to the police and social services for neglect.

Nantwich Education Partnership, a group of 14 primary and two secondary schools in Cheshire, wrote to parents last month after finding some children had been playing the likes of Grand Theft Auto, Gears of War and Call of Duty.

"If your child is allowed to have inappropriate access to any game or associated product that is designated 18+, we are advised to contact the police and children's social care as this is deemed neglectful," the letter read.

Popular music streaming service Spotify has just launched its first-ever games console app - and it's exclusive to Sony's PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 for the time being.

"PlayStation have gaming exclusivity," Murray Pannell, UK marketing director for Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, confirmed to Eurogamer at a preview of the app last week. And how long does the exclusivity period last? "That's to be decided exactly," he confessed, "but certainly for the foreseeable."

At a time when media-streaming services such as Netflix are typically found on every connected console, the exclusivity deal is a minor coup for Sony. Spotify is a leader in digital music, with over 30m tracks available, 60 million active users and an impressive 15 million paying subscribers. The deal effectively calls time on Sony's own ambitions in music streaming, with the Spotify app replacing the platform-holder's Music Unlimited service. The partnership "still means we're in music, but is also the foundation of our music strategy going forward," Pannell said. "It's going to be really good for us."

EA's shooter enjoyed impressive second week sales to hold on to the number one spot. As UK tracker Chart-Track noted, Battlefield 4 had a better launch week than Battlefield Hardline, but Battlefield Hardline had a better second week than its predecessor, with physical sales dropping off by 43 per cent.

From Software's Bloodborne, then, misses out on being the UK's all-formats number one by 22,500 units, but it's number one in the single format chart.

Butt Sniffin Pugs is a game about smelling canine bums. But it's about so much more than that. It's about peeing. And pooping. And barking. And biting. In short: it's a game about being a dog.

Shown off at GDC with a bizarre giant tennis ball/pug bottom controller (more on that later), SpaceBeagles' Butt Sniffin Pugs transcends vanilla concepts like good or bad, or smart or stupid.

Like Noby Noby Boy before it, there are no concrete goals in Butt Sniffin Pugs. You merely frolic about interacting with the scenery. But unlike Keita Takahashi's cult classic, Butt Sniffin Pugs can be played with two players.

Another action role-playing game by Japanese maestro From Software will be available next week: Shadow Tower, the 1998 PS1 game.

Its PSN re-release was mentioned in the latest episode of The PlayStation Blogcast (at around the 15-minute mark). That's a US show, mind you, and they're talking about the US PSN service; it's not automatically the case that we'll get Shadow Tower in Europe because licensing across the regions can cause problems, but let's hope so.

Shadow Tower is a bit like the King's Field games that came before it, and the Souls and Bloodborne games that came after it. That's the general vibe.

Soon, European PlayStation users will be able to easily check whether PlayStation Network is up or down.

Sony Computer Entertainment America recently launched a PSN Service Status Indicator. It tells you which services are up and running. At the time of publication, everything - from account management to gaming and social, from PlayStation Now to the PlayStation Store - has a lovely green tick against it.

Resident Evil 5: Gold Edition has finally arrived on Steam as part of the game's conversion from Games For Windows Live, Capcom has announced.

If you have just regular Resident Evil 5 on Steam or GFWL, you can upgrade to the Gold Edition content for £11.99 / $14.99. That includes all the DLC released up to that point including a versus mode, four new costumes, Mercenaries Reunion, and two new story chapters: Lost in Nightmares and Desperate Escape.

If you don't own the game, you can purchase RE5: Gold Edition for £22.99 / $29.99 , though it's currently on sale for £16.09 / $20.99 until 30th March.

In a new statement and Q&A for FUT fans due to go live this evening, EA detailed its latest move to tackle the problem - tailoring its price ranges to fit individual platforms. You can see a spreadsheet of how prices have changed here.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1745077Wed, 25 Mar 2015 19:00:00 +0000Arnie's new film channels The Last of Us

Upcoming Arnold Schwarzenegger film Maggie looks more than a little inspired by The Last of Us, Naughty Dog's post-apocalyptic PlayStation masterpiece.

Arnie plays a bearded, flannel shirt-wearing father who must protect his daughter during a zombie epidemic.

His daughter, Maggie, played by Little Miss Sunshine and Zombieland's Abigail Breslin, is picked up by her dad from a hospital and the pair then go on the run.

I'm engaged to be married (hooray!) which, if social convention is anything to go by, means my fiancée and I are probably due a conversation about having kids at some point. God I hope she never reads this.

In anticipation of said child-centric chit-chat, I decided it was probably wise to assess my suitability for fatherhood. Using games as a basis for this research meant I could justify doing it on the clock and, as it turns out, video games have some funny old ideas about how to raise children.

So, with all apologies, here's a video on what games taught me about parenting.

I'm still playing Dragon Age: Inquisition, months after it came out. I only came to it over Christmas, but most evenings that I pick up a controller I find myself setting out from Skyhold yet again, venturing into some wilderness or other to see what I can find. The followers I bring with me have mostly fallen silent, their dialogue exhausted after nearly 200 hours of adventuring. This is fine - if I was asked to constantly quip while somebody else poked around, mopping up stray side-quests and flambéing any sheep foolish enough to wander by, I'd have got bored too.

But I haven't tired of the game, even though I'm still playing far beyond the point that most players feel the need to. Fans have complained that there are too many distractions on the game's world map, and you could make the point that BioWare has cluttered its own game unnecessarily. But I'm reminded of something Dragon Age: Inquisition creative director Mike Laidlaw told me a couple of weeks ago - that assuming you needed to collect every little thing in the game was a "miscalibration". You'll finish the main story with a surplus of power unless you have a real aversion to exploring - BioWare has simply populated its world with further activities for those who do want to engage with them.

All of this is worth noting as I am currently staring at a large thread on BioWare's forum branding Jaws of Hakkon as "more of the same", arguing that it just adds another area to explore with a map that quickly fills itself full of side-quests and collectibles. You could make this argument, but it feels unfair - there's far more to the DLC than the icons on its map, while its design feels as if BioWare has responded to some of the early Inquisition feedback.

The Consequence, part two of The Evil Within's Juli Kidman DLC, comes out on Tuesday 21st April.

That's for PC, Xbox One and Xbox 360 worldwide, and PlayStation 4 and PS3 in North America. European PlayStation owners get it a day later, on Wednesday 22nd April, alongside the PlayStation Store update.

Part one, The Assignment, launched a couple of weeks ago. We don't know what to expect from The Consequence, but The Evil Within publisher Bethesda did release the teaser trailer, below.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1744733Tue, 24 Mar 2015 11:43:00 +0000Payday 2 support will continue for two more years

Payday 2 developer Overkill has pledged to continue support for its popular heist shooter into 2017.

The studio confirmed it had reached a deal with publisher 505 Games that will allow it to work on two more years' worth of content.

Payday 2's current model, which mixes free updates, optional paid DLCs and new campaigns, is expected to continue over the next 48 months.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1744684Tue, 24 Mar 2015 09:33:00 +0000A new Singularity title has been teased

UPDATE 03/23/2015 10.24pm: It appears that this teaser may just a celebratory reflection upon Raven Software's 25 year anniversary. The studio's recent Facebook post said, "From the Time Manipulation Device to the multiple factions in multiplayer, Singularity became a cult hit that continues to have a rabid and vocal fan base. This week is a celebration of all things Singularity."

ORIGINAL STORY 03/23/2015 9.14pm: Singularity developer Raven Software has possibly teased a new project related to its time-manipulating first-person shooter.

In a new tweet the developer said, "We're going back" next to the following image:

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1744625Mon, 23 Mar 2015 21:14:00 +0000Game of Thrones: Episode 3 is due this week on all platforms

Game of Thrones: Episode 3, The Sword in the Darkness, is due this week on PC, Mac, PS4, PS3, Xbox One, Xbox 360, iOS and Android, developer Telltale has announced.

PC, Mac, and North American PlayStation users will receive it tomorrow.

Xbox and European PlayStation players will receive it the following day on the 25th.

Battlefield Hardline has topped the UK all-formats chart, giving publisher EA its first number one of the year.

Developed by Dead Space studio Visceral, Hardline beat the chart placing of Battlefield 4, which launched for PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 back in October 2013 in second place, behind Assassin's Creed: Black Flag.

But Hardline reached the top spot with fewer sales - despite the fact it is also available for PS4 and Xbox One. As expected, Hardline is the best-selling multiplatform launch of 2015 so far, although it has few rivals on that front.

The traditional nostalgic view of boys at play is that old playground classic of 'war', where kids pelt around the tarmac making "akka-akka-akka" noises and pretending to shoot each other with machine gun sticks. The alternate to that scenario is, of course, cops and robbers, so it makes sense that for its first foray outside of the military milieu Battlefield would swap tanks for squad cars.

We've already taken a look at Hardline's campaign, so won't be wasting any more time on it for this review. Suffice to say, for all its TV cop show presentation, it's a disappointingly limited, linear and lifeless effort that favours clunky stealth over full-blooded action. At best, you'll hammer through it in order to earn a stack of bonus Battlepacks for use in the real meat of the game: multiplayer.

While the campaign at least pays lip service to the idea that you're playing as an officer of the law, giving you the option to arrest enemies for more XP but not really caring if you shoot them in the back either, such details are absent from online play. Here, it's kill or be killed, due process be damned. If you shoot a criminal in the head with a sniper shot from 100m, or grind him to paste under the wheels of a truck, it's all good.

Few games leave you with as much unfinished business as Dark Souls. A single playthrough is only ever a paltry slice out of an array of delicious possibilities, and you can never walk away with the sense of contented closure that most games would. Sure, you may have defeated Gywn, Lord Of Cinder and seen the end credits, but there's always the lingering knowledge that there is so much more to come, or that you could have done things completely differently.

It didn't help at all that my initial playthrough concluded before the DLC was even announced. If I'd known that I'd have the run through half my game again in order to even access any of the extra stuff, I might have been mindful to hold off 'finishing' it. But it was too damned late. I either had to start over from scratch, or man up and get cracking on New Game Plus. Obviously, I took the latter option. The sheer amount of time invested into my character was too much to walk away from. The crazy amount of grinding to ascend specific weapons, and to boost my stats to even the odds a little - there was no way I was letting that go. I had to keep going. I needed to gain some semblance of closure.

But to return to Lordran for a second playthrough required a special set of circumstances. I knew that I'd need a clear run of a few days - maybe a week. Anyone with a job, kids and any kind of social life and parallel interest knows that finding the right kind of window for a proper Soulsfest is tricky. Almost exactly two years after Dark Souls' debut, I was back in.

We have a certain imaginative sympathy with worlds we are invested in, and elevate them with subconscious complicity. Or to put it another way - the better the game, the more likely we are to give it a pass on below-par elements. No great revelation.

But where does that investment come from, and can it be designed for? I would argue that the prime factor behind it is a deeply interactive foundation. A specific example got me thinking on these lines. Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, an absolute belter by the way, introduces the series first of destructible environments. I wasn't aware of this until, while standing on a bridge, a Rathian smashed through it and I pancaked from 50 feet. I was open-mouthed at this, stunned and thrilled in equal measure by this new factor in hunts.

As I got used to the collapsing bits of scenery, the basic animations and effects came to seem quite amusing - this is not physics-enabled destruction with pieces flying everywhere. The object will shake through a short animation cycle a few times, then 'collapse' into the ground in a giant puff of debris. It is not, by any objective marker, an amazing video game effect in a visual sense.

They don't make 'em like they used to. With Xbox 360's abysmal failure rate and PS3s often falling victim to the yellow light of death, it's a strange that so many consoles from the 90s are still running just fine. To test these vintage video game platforms' durability, the folks at Wired decided to experiment with which ones could survive a 15 foot drop.

Ranging from Super Nintendo to PS3, 12 consoles were selected for this grueling test of valor.

If you thought fighting monsters with a horn was bats*** crazy, then try besting Dark Souls with a set of bongo controllers. Because that's what dedicated player Bearzly just did.

You may remember Bearzly from completing both Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2 with a guitar controller. That was pretty impressive, but the assbackwards bongo controllers might just be the most impractical method he's used yet. Here's how it works.

The bongos technically have six inputs: The front and back halves of each bongo, an actual button in the middle, and a mic. This isn't enough to handle the commands necessary to get through Dark Souls, so Bearzly programmed the bongos to essentially switch gears between three different input sets which he can cycle through by hitting both back (or front) halves of the bongos at the same time.

UPDATE 20/3/15 2.00pm: Square Enix has now released its official trailer for Life is Strange episode two, which shows off snippets of gameplay from later in the episode.

The extended teaser shows gameplay snippets where Max and Chloe investigate the disappearance of missing schoolgirl Rachel Amber, among other things. For the episode's opening 10 minutes, see the video at the bottom of this article.

ORIGINAL STORY 18/3/15 10.15am: Despite being well received by critics and fans, episodic sci-fi adventure Life is Strange has faced criticism for the game's lip-syncing, which regularly fails to match up with what characters are saying.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1743522Fri, 20 Mar 2015 14:02:00 +0000Telltale hints at more The Walking Dead before season three

Telltale has teased that it has more The Walking Dead content coming before the game's third season.

Last year, the developer released a bonus episode that collected a selection of interwoven stories separate from the series' ongoing narrative which bridged The Walking Dead season one and two.

Titled 400 Days, surviving characters from its narrative then popped up in subsequent episodes.

This is our final review of Resident Evil Revelations 2. For our thoughts on the first episode, head over here.

Resident Evil Revelations 2 consists of four main episodes, plus two 'bonus' missions, and finally it is complete. When looking at the (great) first episode I chewed over the nature of a spin-off and covered the main mechanics, and in the final three episodes there are no major changes to the latter - beyond a few new guns. The best thing about these episodes, the bulk of Revelations 2's campaign content, is that the quality and atmosphere is maintained - but finally we get some flair.

This was always more of a problem with the episodic structure than the game itself, but the first part of Revelations 2 did good things without ever quite pressing the Big Red Button. Right from the off with the second episode you're being plunged into more dangerous situations and interesting environments, while the enemies get deadlier.

Hideo Kojima's name has been removed from Metal Gear Solid 5 branding.

Users on Reddit and NeoGAF noticed the tagline "A Hideo Kojima game" and the Kojima Productions logo had been removed from images used to advertise Metal Gear Solid 5 and Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes on Konami's new website.

You can see the images as they were before the change via an archived version of the now defunct Metal Gear Solid 5 website here.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1743859Thu, 19 Mar 2015 12:14:00 +0000Final Symphony concert returns to London with music from FF5, 8, 9 and 13

Final Fantasy concert Final Symphony returns to London this year.

Final Symphony 2 will see the London Symphony Orchestra perform themes from Final Fantasy 5, 8 and 9 on 12th September at the Barbican. The concert will also feature new music from Final Fantasy 13, arranged by original composer Masashi Hamauzu.

Legendary Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu will attend, and will take part in a ticketed, pre-concert talk to discuss his career and answer questions from the audience. There's a new interview with Uematsu in the video, below.

A set of leaked images have revealed Erron Black is a playable character in fighting game Mortal Kombat X.

Erron Black is one of the lesser-known characters from NetherRealm's Mortal Kombat universe. He's a cowboy, essentially, who shoots his enemies with handguns. He first popped up in the Mortal Kombat X comic.

For the better part of the last two decades the adventure game genre was thought dead. Or at least comatose. But in these past few years it's finally returning. And how diverse a return it's been! In one corner, we've had Telltale's streamlined, linear take on interactive storytelling. In another, we've got Double Fine remixing old templates with modern tech and style with Broken Age. And then there's Maniac Mansion creators Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick successfully Kickstarting their faux 1987 throwback Thimbleweed Park. So how will The Odd Gentlemen, the LA studio behind The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom and Wayward Manor, handle reprising King's Quest? The answer is a mix of all of the above in a way that's distinctly its own.

From the early press demo I see at GDC, King's Quest seeks to combine Telltale's episodic structure with Double Fine's lofty production values while staying true to the classic Sierra games with their penchant for comic deaths and multiple endings. This may be billed as a "reboot," but it's not the sort of modern update that fills vintage fans with dread. You won't be mashing buttons to fend off dragons, nor will you clumsily push blocks around to solve those popular "physics puzzles" that are all the rage these days. Instead, you'll be using your noggin to suss out the solution to many of King Graham's most entertaining problems. Or die trying (incidentally, you'll do that a lot).

That isn't to suggest that The Odd Gentlemen have simply followed Sierra's blueprint to a T. Like J.J. Abrams did with Star Trek, The Odd Gentlemen has come up with a clever narrative device that makes its King's Quest adventure simultaneously a re-imagining while remaining canon.

Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin's release date has been brought forward in Europe to 2nd April on PS4, Xbox One and PC, Bandai Namco has announced.

It was previously scheduled for release on 7th April.

The Scholar of the First Sin remastering is a little confusing in that half of its features are exclusive to its re-release while the other half are already available as a free update to the original game.